Opal Lee is a writer.
Ireland’s new president, Catherine Connolly, is an outspoken left-winger who champions the rights of the Palestinians and opposes Europe’s militarization drive. Her resounding victory came as a huge shock to the conservative political establishment.
After World War I, city hall Socialists around Italy built an impressive array of welfare programs, schools, and libraries. The Fascist backlash soon showed the limits of their strength and the impossibility of relying on urban citadels of power alone.
Unions in the US have responded to the hostile organizing environment by targeting smaller shops in more peripheral industries. To actually grow the labor movement, however, they will need to organize large units in the economy’s fast-growing sectors.
The Democrats have failed to mount a serious response to Donald Trump’s authoritarianism. Their fecklessness has left the door open for democratic socialists like Zohran Mamdani to position themselves as the real opposition to Trump.
We read Graham Platner’s whole Reddit archive. The vilification of the Maine candidate for Senate doesn’t square with what he actually wrote in his posts.
Bolivia’s election of the center-right Rodrigo Paz Pereira marks the end of the MAS’s nearly 20-year rule. As MAS self-destructed, Paz appealed to an urban middle class that expanded as the Left achieved historic reductions in poverty and social inequality.
With the US government shutdown effectively paralyzing the National Flood Insurance Program, private firms such as Neptune Insurance Holdings are seizing the opportunity to push for the near-total privatization of flood insurance.
At a rally last night in Queens, New York, with Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Zohran Mamdani addressed a crowd of 13,000: “For too long, freedom has belonged only to those who can afford to buy it.”
Following an industry trend, fast-food chain Shake Shack recently updated its terms of use agreement to include a binding arbitration agreement and class-action waiver denying customers their legal right to take the company to court.
The vision of W. E. B. Du Bois was one of congressional democracy, critical of presidential regimes that concentrate power in the hands of one individual — an individual who can, say, impose his vision of a White House ballroom in the sky upon all of us.
A recent successful court case brought by university professors against the Trump administration’s ideological deportations is an important win for supporters of Palestinian liberation and opponents of rising authoritarianism in the US.
A Silicon Valley firm has contracted with Immigration and Customs Enforcement to build out a social media surveillance dragnet. Critics say that the AI-driven software will target immigrants for political speech.
Donald Trump’s yes-men at the Consumer Product Safety Commission are withdrawing a series of proposed safety rules, including an appendage-saving safety mandate for table saws. This will mean thousands more fingers lost per year.
The Supreme Court, urged on by well-funded far-right ideologues like Stephen Miller, is set to curtail important provisions of the Voting Rights Act, opening the door to aggressive, racially based disenfranchisement.
The deleterious impact of technology on everyday life is generating a growing backlash in Western societies. At its most radical fringe, this includes a political subculture that promotes violent struggle against technological civilization as a whole.
The welfare state is essential for keeping the nonworking population out of poverty. But we shouldn’t discount the role of predistributive measures like strong unions and minimum wage laws in reducing inequality.
Germany’s Social Democrats often sound the alarm about the rising far right. It would help if their own elected officials didn’t constantly spread misinformation about migrants stealing from the welfare system.
Establishment Democrats spent a full year complaining the Left forced them to be “woke.” But then a left populist, Graham Platner, threatened to win in Maine, so they went right back to trying to cancel someone over old internet posts.
A British court has acquitted the only soldier to face trial over the Bloody Sunday massacre in Derry in 1972. The outcome is no vindication of “Soldier F” or of the British establishment, whose long cover-up made a successful prosecution so challenging.
Over 51,000 teachers are on strike for fair pay and manageable classrooms in Canada’s most right-wing province. With the threat of back-to-work legislation looming, other unions are indicating that they may join the fight.